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A research team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) Designed a quantum cryptographic chip Designed to meet the security needs of the quantum computing revolution. The RISC-V chip has been manufactured according to the design of researchers and is intended to be a proof-of-work concept for protecting systems from attacks based on quantum computing, which is generally considered to be one of the most important security frontiers in the future. In addition to the RISC-V-based hardware implementation (including ASIC and FPGA structures), the researchers also developed 29 additional instructions for the architecture to enable the required workload to be processed correctly on-chip.
Traditional cryptography is usually based on the fact that the sender and receiver hold the same “unlock” key for any given encrypted data. Over time, the length of these keys (which may include letters, numbers, and special characters) has increased, with the increase in the performance of the hardware available in the field of general computing. The idea is to prevent brute force attacks, which will only try enough character combinations so that they can eventually find the correct answer to unlock the encrypted message content. Given a large enough security key (and also depending on the encryption protocol used), it is almost impossible for current hardware to try enough combinations in a short enough time-even if the latest GPUs support extreme parallelism to make the effort worthwhile.
A piece of information encrypted and encoded by AES-128, the most popular encryption algorithm today, cannot be cracked even by Bitcoin, the most powerful distributed computing task available today. For reference, it takes about 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years for the network to do this (it would be great if you can calculate such a high number), while in relative terms, it is estimated that our universe only existed for 14 billion years. Encryption cracking algorithms in the field of quantum computing require quantum systems. It is estimated that there are 2,953 logical qubits for near-instant decryption of AES-128 keys, and 6,681 logical qubits for AES-256.
The current quantum technology has achieved “only” A total of 100 qubits, So we are still a little far away from the security collapse.But since the first truly first quantum computer appeared, quantum computing is developing at an alarming rate-a Two-qubit system In 1998, it was demonstrated by Isaac Chuang of Los Alamos National Laboratory, Neil Gershenfeld of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Mark Kubinec of the University of California, Berkeley, which can load data and output solutions. The acceleration of the number of qubits in new quantum systems and the potential emergence of new decryption algorithms may disrupt current encryption technologies faster than expected. This is why the TUM research team focuses on preventing security challenges, which are expected to eventually become a reality.
When designing their quantum security chip, TUM researchers adopted a cohesive (and the world’s first) hardware and software co-design method. Specially designed hardware can accelerate the current paradigm of quantum cryptography, based on lattice Kyber algorithmThe researchers said that compared with the current software Kyber encryption solution, they achieved a 10 times performance improvement, while the energy used was reduced by about 8 times. The chip also supports a more advanced form of quantum encryption, Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation, which improves performance by 21 times.coin), which is expected to be deployed when lattice-based methods (such as Kyber) no longer cut it.
In addition to Kyber and SIKE acceleration, the research team also uses this chip as an accelerator for smart hardware Trojan detection. points Trojan horse is a term that refers to the addition of hardware-based solutions designed to circumvent typical security mechanisms by providing backdoors that either steal information from remote attackers or enable silent and uninterrupted processing of infected systems. Discovery of the visit.These hardware Trojans can be secretly implemented at various stages of hardware manufacturing (for example, in the design or manufacturing stage), and with the (false) reports of certain Supermicro-manufactured motherboards, concerns about this potential attack vector have swept the public space Allegedly have a dedicated chip to transfer data to China.
To fill in the information gap about this new type of security vulnerability, TUM researchers also installed four different hardware Trojans on their chips. These will destroy their proof-of-concept chips layer by layer, and at the same time provide each step of the process to newly developed machine learning algorithms, even in the absence of technical information about the exact function of the hardware, they can be trained to recognize hardware functions. This helps to identify components (Trojan horses) that perform functions unrelated to the actual task of the chip, which may have entered the final design. This research may also have a lasting impact in the field of reverse engineering, and other parties (academic or otherwise) are likely to be pursuing it.
Quantum computing is at the forefront of a beautiful new world in technology. When I wrote this article, I was reminded of Arthur C. Clarke’s third law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” On the one hand, it is difficult for me to distinguish between the two.
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